REM
 

Reckoning is a great album, isnt it. I love harborcoat, and second guessing, dont go back to rockville and little america. Its so much better than their recent stuff....is the fist record murmur any good??

Reckoning is my all time favorite REM album. They are easily in my top 5 favorite bands ever!!! I love them to death and still are great live. Murmur is fucking heaven dude....get it immediately. Yeah there last two records were kind of weak, but I loved Up.

uhm and what about Automatic for the people?
I love this album...from the beginning up to the end!

Murmur is great. My favorite REM song is PREETY PERSUASION. My second favorite is WOLVES, LOWER off of the chronic town EP. (I got that one on cassette and vinyl) Chronic Town is from 1981. Murmur is from 1983.

I love the old REM. Everything up to Out of Time. that one is great but everything after left me sad.

Here are my fave REM in order

Reckoning
Life's Rich Pageant
Murmur
Document
Fables of the Reconstruction
Green

I love all those albums, plus I gots dead letter office.

Hello, I saw you, I know you, I knew you
I think I can remember your name

....name.

I love REM. Chronic Town through Fables are my favorites, with Murmur being my most favorite. I like all their stuff though.

monster.

I used to have Murmur but don't have it anymore, it's not my favorite. I have Lifes Rich Pageant, Reconstruction of the Fables, Chronic Town, Document (on vinyl), Dead Letter Office, Eponymous, and one single on vinyl (The One I Love--is that the title?)

One thing i really love about REM is the album artwork.

really endlesslyfuckinghorrible music.

Woaah! Ive just noticed the lyrics to the song "unseen power of the picket fence" by Pavement.

Some bands I like to name check,
And one of them is REM,
Classic songs with a long history
Southern boys just like you and me.
R - E - M
Flashback to 1983,
Chronic Town was their first EP
Later on came Reckoning
Finster's art, and titles to match:
South Central Rain, Don't Go Back To Rockville,
Harbourcoat, Pretty Persuasion,
You were born to be a camera,
Time After Time was my least favourite song,
Time After Time was my least favourite song.
The singer, he had long hair
And the drummer he knew restrait.
And the bass man he had all the right moves
And the guitar player was no saint.
So lets go way back to the ancient times
When there were no 50 states,

And on a hill there stands Sherman
Sherman and his mates.
And they're marching through Georgia,
we're marching through Georgia,
we're marching through Georgia
G-G-G-G-Georgia
They're marching through Georgia,
we're marching through Georgia,
marching through Georgia
G-G-G-G-Georgia
and there stands REM

(Aye Sir, Aye Sir, Aye Sir they're coming, Aye Sir, move those wagons, Aye
Sir, Artillery's in place Sir, Aye Sir, Aye Sir, hide it, hide it, Aye
Sir, run, run.)

YES, That's my favorites in order as well. Long live r..e.m

"Wolves, Lower" is one of my favorite songs too, Rob.

The five (in order) R.E.M. albums every music lover should own:
Reckoning
Chronic Town ep
Lifes Rich Pageant
Fables of the Reconstruction
Murmur

Those five are all pretty equal in how great they are. Oh, and atsonicpark is a tosser.
I bought Fables first, then Murmur, then Reckoning, and then Lifes Rich Pageant came out...they were all haha cassettes...

It doesn't get much cooler than the When the Light is Mind dvd though. Some cool stuff was left out, but plenty of cool stuff is included to more than make up for it.

Along with Green, Automatic For The People is the only current WB-era one that I can strongly recommend. I don't have a whole lot of appreciation for Out of Time which has about three good songs. OoT was the first "alternative" mega-hit album in history, by the way. Nirvana's Nevermind would follow over half a year later. I thought I was going to be sick the first time I heard "Endgame," for instance. In short, R.E.M. broke through the college radio underground into the mainstream by LRP ('86) and then also conquered the mainstream first with OoT ('91). Although, I do have the studio boot from Out of Time, Time of Outtakes, so I must like it a little...and several live shows from the tour and the first Unplugged too which features several OoT songs.

I've never thought of it like that but, yes, you're probably right. I certainly can't think of anything before it that could compete. U2s The Unforgettable Fire maybe? Although I'm not sure that U2 were ever 'alternative' in the same way that REM were - more a grass-roots band that suddenly became titans. Hmm, an interesting one this.

I'm a fan of The Unforgettable Fire (their best, in my opinion), but it only went to number twelve on the US chart. (And I still like the Joshua Tree and War too. War's getting the reissue treatment with extras soon). You can go with '87's The Joshua Tree if you like since it also topped both the US and UK charts. And its critical praise certainly snowballed the Lifes Rich Pageant hype from the previous year ('86) into a movement. And by '88's Rattle and Hum feature film, the transition to the mainstream was complete.


Well, if we examine the question, U2 are, as we know, on Island, a relatively small-but-known label before being sold to PolyGram in '89 (now it's part of the Universal Music Group behemoth and U2 are enjoying megabucks), and R.E.M. started on the truly independent I.R.S. label. Although, it wasn't until R.E.M.'s second effort on Warner Bros. until they went no. 1 on the British and American charts. It's a toss-up really and ultimately it depends on how "slick" one thinks early-to-mid U2 is. We can also think of it this way: R.E.M. got the deal for a multi-album contract in the 100 mil neighborhood from Warner before U2 got their even bigger deal when they re-upped. Thanks for your input.

Yes, but by the time they hit global domination levels with The Joshua Tree they were far too established (a mixture of the success of the single Pride. the release of the Live at Red Rocks video and their quite astonishing appearance at Live Aid). I actually remember the day that The Joshua Tree was released, seeing the queues outside HMV. It was a frenzy of almost Beatlemania-like proportions. Certainly I've never seen any other band grow to that size in my lifetime. People talk about Coldplay being massive should've been around to witness U2s rise. That video for 'Where the Streets Have no Name' is one of my all-time favourite promos, showing a band that imagines itself as being at a certain level of popularity, suddenly confronted with the sheer scale of its fame. Still sends shivers to the back of my neck whenever I watch it. A remarkable time for a remarkable band.

I do still think you're right about Out of Time though. I was thinking maybe The Cure's Disintegration, but no. It can't compete with Out of Time. Although, hold on, now that I think about it, Simple Minds' Once Upon a Time might arguably offer a decent challenge. But even here, I do think we're talking about a quite different reading of the word 'alternative' to the one associated with a band like REM. It's just a shame that Out of Time happened to be such a dull album.

Good points all...I remember the fever.

Sad that Pylon refused to open for U2.
http://209.85.215.104/search?q=cache...&client=safari

Simple Minds - Once Upon A Time!
Man, you're naming my long lost cassette collection! haha
That one didn't even break a top ten though.

Something that strikes me about the meteoric rise of REM is how little it seems to have with anything outside of the music. U2 and (to a lesser degree) Simple Minds absolutely resonated with a certain cultural turn in the mid-80s, as people began to question the values of the era (albeit in a way that it could be argued simply mirrored them). REM on the other hand seemed more like a band that simply became huge on the strength of a strong single that they were then able to follow up with a solid, if ultimately unremarkable, album. In this sense there was a kind of inevitability to the rise of U2, which definitely isn't something that I'd say about REM. In that way REM are one of the more mysterious bands, at least in terms of their success.

What album are you saying is unremakable? Because I consider both Document and Green to be remarkable albums and both represent their immediate before and after breakthrough.